Home extension building regulations approval 

Once Planning permission or a Certificate of Lawful Development has been obtained for your home extension, the next stage for your home extension designer or architect is to upgrade and enhance the scheme for the Building Regulations.

This stage of the design is probably the most important if you are to control your builder and to ensure that you get what you want. Many homeowners think that the Building Regulations will cover all aspects of the works required.  This is wrong and you need to check that your home extension designer or architect is catering for all of the works required to ensure that your builder includes and prices for everything rather than it becoming a costly extra cost item during the works.

Examples of typical home extension works that get missed are decorating and the extent, external making good, new landscaping, provision for exposing poor ground conditions or existing services, making good, matching of internal joinery item or upgrading the existing house as well, upgrade or amendment to the existing house gas, water or electrical services, relocation of meters or consumer units......The list is far longer than these items.

An experienced home extension designer or architect will make provision for all these overlapping works to safeguard your interests but many will not provide that extent or level of thinking for you and do just enough for Building Regulations compliance.  This will leave you very exposed to builder extra costs so make sure you are getting a comprehensive set of home extension drawings and specifications.

Most home extension designers or architects will use the local Councils building control department for checking and approving your home extension building plans.  Others will have set up a partnering agreement with their preferred council to vet, check and approval all other council areas building regulations.  Another level of building control service is from approved private building regulation inspectors.

There are advantages and disadvantages for each of the 3 routes for compliance but our preferred method is to always use the local councils LABC department due to their extensive local knowledge even if this does not always lead to a consistent interpretation of the regulations.